What the fuck: Amazon pulls all Macmillan titles (electronic and paper) after Kindle pricing dispute. [via The Faster Times]

Gawker.tv has clips of Oprah audience members doing group process after Jay Leno’s visit to O’s show. WARNING: Watching this has basically ruined/made my day. It has sent me into paroxysms of stupidity, which are kind of like hate-sex orgasms, only they come out kind of sideways, and share certain fundamental attributes with the concept of “negative infinity.” No Harold Bloom for at least an hour after Oprah audience share-time, or you will cramp up and drown like a swimmer with a gutfull of Chinese food. Also, what is negative infinity, exactly? Dr. Achilles at the Math Forum, take it away-

>I would also like a real world example of negative infinity that I
>can use to explain it to my daughter.

Regarding this question, I don’t think I can help because I am at a loss to come up with an example of negative numbers or of positive infinity which would work for a 4-year-old (and I can’t even come up with an example of negative infinity for anyone, offhand.

Best wishes for you and your child in working through tough math concepts.

Oh, well. It was worth a try.

Fascinating profile of artist Tino Sehgal at the NYT.

This is pretty funny: UNHAPPY HIPSTERS.

Heather Christle said something interesting last night in the Q & A session after her great reading. I don’t have the exact quote, and she was joking, but when Jeremiah asked how an online reading differed from F & B (Flesh and Blood), Heather said something about this HTMLGiant live stream marking the end of flesh and blood readings. I felt simultaneously a little apocalyptic and a little excited that I could wear my pajamas to any reading ever. Will face-to -ace readings change? Will they stream? Will they go hybrid?

It’s Career Day at Gawker. Today we learn about how to be a “literary manboy.” I was happily/worriedly checking off boxes when I realized I’m still a good nine years below the beginning of the designated age range (36-45). Also, the Gawker piece is actually a response to this Times profile of a freelance journalist named John Bowe. The piece is called “A Bachelor’s Effort to Understand Love,” which is a feat I have never even attempted, so uh–bullet dodged? Also, the Gawker piece ends with this priceless rant by the great Moe Tkacik-

I also asked Moe Tkacik, a former Jezebel and Gawker editor, what she thought. Her analysis was that men are “just incredibly late, and until then loathe, to acknowledge that there are rewards and advantages to companionship/fidelity/love that aren’t purely romantic/sexual/possibly, on some largely delusional level ‘spiritual.’ So they conflate ‘that time when I allowed myself to be vulnerable because I was in fucking Saipan WRITING A BOOK ABOUT MODERN DAY SLAVERY OF ALL LIFE AFFIRMING THINGS’ or ‘that time when I was somehow more emotionally available — possibly I suppose owing in part to the fact that I was fifteen years old?’ with ‘the only real time I fell in love,’ the transcendence of which, until it is somehow surpassed — not super likely to happen at the next Housing Works party btw — stands as the unimpeachable order from within themselves to neglect all other minor romances.”

A+, Moe, though for the record, wonderful things can and do  happen at Housing Works parties. Happy Friday, everyone!

Gigantic American Biography Call For Submissions So Get Writing Now Freak-O.

Brad Green has selected Stephen Pemberton as the winner of Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, for his entry to the relate-food-to-childhood-n-stuff contest:

Orange roughy. My parents crammed that shit into my mouth as if they had some kind of bet between the two of them.

Stephen, please send word of your homestead and the book will be along its way!

Very Short List just sent me a link to a site that chronicals reusable cover art in historical novels. I am strangely and inexplicably fascinated by the recycling. I think it’s John Berger in Ways of Seeing who talks about how reproductions have changed the way we see art. Repetition as its own artform. I’m sure a boatload of folks have made that observation, come to think of it.

What about the book called Kleopatra and the one called Scheherazade with the same black-veiled woman on the cover?

Consollection [via Clusterflock]

MULTIFUNKTIONS SPIELCOMPUTER
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Quite an unusual gaming system with everything being handled through a built-in LED-matrix. Punchcards were offering different gaming-possibilities.

ENTEX
1972